DVD Notes: “August Rush”
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| Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Freddie Highmore jam in Washington Square |
In his review of Whiplash, Richard Brody writes, “Movies about musicians offer musical
approximations that usually satisfy in inverse proportion to a viewer’s
devotion to the actual music behind the story.” One might make the same comment
just as aptly when discussing August Rush, except, while Whiplash
was clearly about jazz musicians, it’s difficult to know what musical tradition
August Rush has taken as its subject. We’re treated with the rarefied
musings of the eponymous 11-year-old musical prodigy (Freddie Highmore) and his
mentor, “Wizard” (Robin Williams), about how music is what surrounds us all –
in the air, on the wind, in all living forms – and what connects everything,
including all of us to everything else, even the stars and galaxies. One has
only to “follow the music” – forgive me, “The Music” – to reach one’s
fulfilment, the movie posits.
The New Yorker recently
published a humourous article in which Ayn Rand (a fictional persona of the novelist)
reviewed children’s movies. “An industrious woman neglects to charge for her
housekeeping services and is rightly exploited for her naïveté,” she writes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “She dies without ever having sought her own
happiness as the highest moral aim. I did not finish watching this movie,
finding it impossible to sympathise with the main character.” She gave it Zero
Stars. Sadly, Ms Rand was not around to provide her very straightforward acuity
and pointed views on August Rush, but I think it would’ve been just the
thing to cut through the drivel offered here.